Hymne l'Amour
by dnrl
Summary: She was the most beautiful thing in his world, his sun and air, his everything. Now he has lost her, he is drowning, and he just wishes he would die. AU Thuke, three-shot.
1. mots oubliés

**Hymne l'amour**

_by: dnrl

* * *

_

one: mots oubliés

* * *

He finds memories of her in the oddest places; he will be walking down the street, and a puff of cigarette smoke will float towards him on the breeze, and he will be back in Paris, outside _l'café_, a coffee in hand and her bare foot tracing circles on the inside of his thigh. Sometimes it is the sight of things; he will catch moonlight glinting on water and he will think of the Seine on the night he first kissed that full mouth, the full moon glinting and glimmering upon the water. When he slides his tie into place in the morning, her hands are a ghostly cold shadow that hovers just above his fingers, slipping and sliding, pressing sloppy kisses here and there.

At night, he lies in the silence and the dark with the windows open, the roar of traffic numbing his ears. He can feel her, sometimes, in the touch of sheets against his skin, her sweet mouth whispering French declarations of love against his skin as she nuzzles down his body, slow and sensuous as she is in all things. He sees her when he wakes in the morning; he leaves his eyes half-open when he turns to face the other side of the bed during the golden dawns, and he sees the black curls splayed across the white pillowcase, feels the gentle wash of breath breaking against his skin…but all eyes must open eventually, and she is gone.

He works as he always did: efficiently. He is a machine, but he does not go out for beer after work with those who used to be friends, nor does he stop by any pubs. He orders his groceries online, and they are waiting for him on his doorstep the day after he places the order. He can do all of his own repairs around his house, and he lives as one person, so he cleans after himself as well. He lives in a penthouse apartment with an uncomfortable couch no one ever sits on and glass _nouveau riche_ end tables that no one will ever use, and he remembers their little cottage on the bank of the winding river.

It was small, something her grandmother had owned. Smaller than most apartments, but she had had plumbing and heating installed to make it livable, and she had insisted upon _living_ in it. He had put up some sort of half-hearted protest, but they both knew that he would go along anyway, and so he did. There had been a living room full of mismatched, overstuffed, comfortable furniture – a tall, straight-backed armchair that she said reminded her of Sherlock Holmes, a squat, comfortable recliner, a long, low, creaking, broken-in couch that seemed to be made to allow them to cuddle up together and read in front of the fire. There were rugs, threadbare and worn, and tarnished pots hanging from old oak rafters in the kitchen, and it was _home_.

This place wasn't, and it wouldn't ever be, and he knew that. He knew that every day he passed in and out of it, and when he was feeling particularly nostalgic, he would make himself go and lie down on the hard, uncomfortable couch in the middle of his cold, sterile living room, and he would know that no one would ever dare to cuddle on this couch, and that was why he bought it. No one would cuddle him again; no one but her, and since she never would, there was no more warm comfort for him. Ever.

When he passes the little home-run candle shop on the corner of 36th and Aldersgate, he has to stop, even though the sky is pregnant with rain and rumbling fit to burst, because they are burning honeysuckle and French vanilla candles, her two favorite scents. He owns no candles, no decorations, but he enters the store and leaves with fifty French vanilla tea candles. He lights one every time he thinks her name, and he has lit them all within the hour. He sits in his glossy, magazine-worthy kitchen eating takeout Italian and surrounded by fifty burning French vanilla candles, and if his food is a little wet and salty, he doesn't care to ponder why. He scrubs his face twice as hard that night and ignores the invisible tears that still seem to stick to his skin.

He holds on to his music; it is the one rope to his sanity he refuses to tear away. In a sense, he lives only through the music he hears – his mouth will not articulate the words, and his mind will feign forgetfulness. And so he remembers the little songs she used to hum in a jumble of English and French in the early morning as she would kiss him, her little _hymne l'amour_, her anthem of love to him in the tiny hours, and he thinks that he would sing them back to her, even if only in his mind – but his mind is so forgetful. He has forgotten the words to the anthem she so lovingly crooned in the dawn, and those _mots oubliés_, those words forgotten, refuse to come back.

In the darkness of the night, surrounded by the scent of burnt-out French vanilla candles, he turns his face into his pillows and refuses to acknowledge the tears that slide from his eyes, focusing instead on the mantra that slides from his mouth: _Thalia, Thalia, Thalia, Thalia_.

* * *

**A/N**

Probably the _strangest_ fic I've ever written.

Was listening to various pieces of music last night and was totally inspired to write Thuke and foreign things at the same time, which eventually morphed into this AU. Thalia is French, Luke is British, they were in love, something happened. Story is finished and in three sections: this first, "_mots oubliés"_, the second, "_mots en partie"_, and the third, "_mots rappelés"_. A short epilogue entitled "_hymne d'espoir"_ is in the works.

…I don't even have anything to say for myself. –hangs head in shame- God, this is sort of sad. Chapters are meant to be short; I wanted something terse, with punch, but not abrupt. For those of you who play music, think of it as an accented note line accompanied by a decrescendo and a _legato_ effect. (…I'm a _doooork_.)

Will post every day with new chapter.

Will also have the next chapter for _Eye of Gods_ up in a day or so. Hopefully. GOD I HATE YOU ADA. –pout-

Also, Josh Groban for the epic win of life. (Him and Chuck Norris, because come on. _He's Chuck Norris_.)

-sigh- I'm sorry I keep doing this to you poor readers...please love me. -cling-


	2. mots en partie

**Hymne l'amour  
**

_by: dnrl

* * *

_

two: mots en partie

* * *

_I'd appreciate it if you'd take the Travittore account in Italy_, his supervisor had said over lunch two weeks ago, as cigar smoke and the smell of hard whiskey and cold scotch swirled around in the air. _You're easily the best equipped to handle the financial details. I have faith in your abilities_. Even as the conversation rewound itself in his mind, he could taste the ghost of his eggs benedict and the acrid tang of his orange juice. He had left the week after, and all in all, it had taken him less than two days to unravel the complications in the account, leaving a satisfied customer and a pleased supervisor, who had forced a week of paid vacation upon him.

He disliked forced relaxation, because his mind would linger on what he was missing even more so than it did during evenings alone in his apartment. He sought to busy himself with crossword and number puzzles, with coffee and good food, with art galleries and bars. Nothing seemed to cure his distaste for enforced vacation or his rising nostalgia. Memories rose inside his mind as surely as a tide swelled with the moon, invading and pervading his thoughts and senses and perceptions. Every woman he saw, young or old, fair or dark, beautiful or ugly, it was her, with cascading velvet black hair and eyes the color of a darkening blue sky on a perfect day. There was no escape from all-encompassing memory, and it was driving him to the brink of despair.

He was sitting in a small, out-of-the-way café near the edge of Florence's city boundaries, not far from the small inn he was working out of. The smell of strong, roasted, freshly ground coffee pervaded the air around him, mixed with the odor of baking bread. He had finished a cup of coffee and was contemplating ordering another as he idly flipped through the paper, looking for all the world like a complete and contented English businessman on vacation. The breeze blew in through the open windows and doors, early-morning sunlight shining off of the cobblestones, tempered by the clouds above. A man was softly strumming a guitar in the corner. Had he been another man, he would have been – _could_ have been – content. As it was, he was mildly relaxed, but all he could think of was how much she would love this little place. He glanced out of the windows and found himself frozen to the spot.

She seemed smaller than the last time he had seen her – like she had shrunk in stature, though certainly not in spirit. She was as slender as he remembered, dressed in a white skirt and dark teal top, both fluttering in the breeze. Her hair was loose and hanging about her shoulders and waist, little strands flying here and there in the movement of the air. And her face – her face, the face he had been dreaming of for a year now, every night and every day. Her curved lips were parted just slightly, her nose a strong, straight, slender line. Her cheekbones were stronger in the morning light, and her eyes were focused down the street, hard and strong and the most beautiful shade of blue he had ever seen. He sat, transfixed, as a thousand memories and sensations welled up inside of his chest; the breeze brought him a waft of her perfume, and he inhaled it as greedily as a starving man would a banquet.

She moved, then, down towards wherever she had been looking, walking in the little endearing lilted way that he loved so much. He was out of his seat in a moment, coffee and paper forgotten. The man with the guitar made a noise of protest, and he thrust some sort of money at him as he dashed out the door, suddenly unable to simply sit passively and watch her walk away from him again. Not again.

"_Thalia_," he gasped out, and her name made it _real_. She turned to him, hair flying back as her head spun, eyes wide and curious, mouth parted to respond. He spared a moment of thought to how he must look – he had not shaved that morning, his shirt was open two buttons at the top, his hair was in a state of chaos, but he didn't _care_, because it was her. "Oh god, Thalia."

Her eyes were dark, her mouth a tight line in her face. "Luke," she said, and even though there was no warmth in the arctic bite of her voice, it was still hers, and his world became a shade more real.

"Please, please, just stay and talk. Sit and talk with me," he asked, and her eyes were hurt and shadowed and cold all at once. She adjusted her bag on her shoulder and took her forearm out of his grip.

"There is nothing to talk about." Her voice was cold and controlled, but he could hear the soft decay of her s's and th's into little z-sounds, her hold on English giving way to her French birth as it always does when passion threatens to break free. "I know what you are now, and I have grown to a woman who will not be fooled by you again. This is all there is to say, is it not?"

"No, it's not, Thalia, _please_. The café, it has _café noisette_, and it's not bad. And, and, there are fresh scones, blueberry and raspberry, and _please_, just for a few minutes. You can say anything you want, anything at all, just talk to me."

They seated themselves at a table after ordering two _café noisettes_ and four blueberry scones. She sat with her ankles crossed and her fingers circled around the coffee cup, shoulders hunched up and over as her elbows rested on the table. She's a graceful creature, had been for as long as he's known her, and it's an unconscious grace. He supposed that it came with her name, but she used to hit him for making that pun, so he stopped. She looked up at him, nostrils flaring in silent anger. "You will say nothing, and _I _will talk. I will drink my coffee, eat my scones, and leave, and I will never see you again."

"Thalia – "

"You will say _nothing_. You are worse zan zee scum of zee earth," she snapped, pressing her mouth together and reigning in her focus. When she spoke again, her th's werecrisp. "I left my work a week early to come home and surprise you. I wait for three hours with a cold supper, and you stumble into our – _the_ house with some blond woman from work. It is _monstrueux_! How dare you betray me like that?" she demanded. This whole time, her voice had remained cold and level. Her eyes betrayed her desperation, her sorrow, her pain, and he felt like baring his breast and handing her a knife, because surely having his heart chopped out would not hurt _quite_ so much as this. "And then, then you try to apologize, and you – you don't even…all you can ask is _why I'm home_, _why didn't I call_, and all you wanted was warning so you wouldn't be _caught!_"

"Thalia," he pleaded, and her control snapped. There were tears in her eyes, and her voice was loud and harsh, breaking.

"No! No, no, _non_, you have no right to speak! I do not care if you are attempting to, to defend yourself against whatever I might say, but it has no impact and no…no importance! Nothing you can say – _nothing_ – can fix the wrongs that you have done!" She was crying now, and her nose was running, and tears were splashing into her coffee. Her words were elongating, her vowels open and round, and she was almost completely losing English, her accent the strongest he had ever heard it. "You broke my heart, betrayed my trust, ruined my home, and made a fool of me! I will not stand for you, for your apologies, or for any of it!" She stood, bumping the table. Their coffees fell and her cup shattered against the stones, the scones falling onto the street. He ignored it, standing and lunging for her as her heel turned in a crack and she begun to fall.

He caught her and pulled her close to himself, tight to his chest, as they knelt in the middle of the rough street. She was stiff as a board in his arms, and she radiated nothing but hurt, but she did not pull away, did not struggle. Slowly, slowly, she softened, her head resting in the crook of his neck, his shirt drenched with tears. She did not raise her arms to return the embrace, nor was there anything close to even friendship in her actions. Rather, it was the primal need for human beings to be held when they are hurting, to be comforted when they are sorrowful. That was the only role he could have in her life, and he was happy in it, because he could comfort her at last. He could not fix what was broken, but he could soothe away the pain.

When she was finished crying, a little over an hour later, they parted. Her eyes were still distant, but not so cold, not so removed. She rested a hand over the curve of his jaw, her fingertips playing with the soft curls that wound around the bottom of his ear. There was an emotion that was something like regret that played out on her features, and as she turned and walked away he had an odd sensation of memory - _mots en partie_, words in part, and as she left he sang softly to her in little French phrases she used to sing on Sunday mornings to the piano on the radio. She paused for a moment, mid stride, and made a move as though to turn, but then she apparently thought better of it and continued on her way.

His heart and soul are aflame and enshrined in ice all at once, hot with passion and cold with shame, leaving him lukewarm, tepid and alone in a sunny alleyway in Florence, singing to himself with words half-remembered, his own _mots en partie_, as the world passes him by.

* * *

A/N

Luke is an emo pants. And Thalia throws a temper tantrum. I tried to insert the disintegration of Thalia's English, but it always came out sounding more Cajun than anything else (damn my heritage), so I'll just let you people use your clever little imaginations to figure out what she sounds like.

On a side note, this is probably my least favorite chapter. It seemed iffy to me, and the characters were off. :\ Also, epilogue is complete. :)

See you guys tomorrow~ TTFN


	3. mots rappelés

**Hymne l'amour  
**

_by: dnrl

* * *

_

three: mots rappelés

* * *

He smelled of cologne when he wrote her the letter, all those years ago. It's a brand he didn't wear anymore, but he could still catch a waft of it on the air as he unfolded the yellowing paper with trembling fingers. His script unfurled on the pages, cramped and dark loops and curves pressing indentations on the back of the sheet. He ran his fingers over the back just to feel the bumps from the ballpoint pen, reading as he did so. "_My dearest love,_" it began. "_I'm writing you this letter just as I've wrote countless others – with no intention of sending them. Instead, I set pen to paper to relive those memories that feel as though they are slipping from me, so that I may hold onto them for just a bit longer. Memories – like the taste of you on lazy Tuesday mornings, black coffee and the sweet taste of whatever baked good you'd eaten that morning, a muffin or cinnamon roll, perhaps a scone. Or perhaps memories like simply twisting my fingers in yours, wherever we were – in a cinema, or nestled into bed in the little hours of the morning. I hope never to forget how your hand felt inside of mine, small and slender and warm and like all the goodness in the world_…"

It continued on in the vein, just as all the letters in the cardboard box at his feet did. There were literally hundreds of letters, some stained with coffee rings or tears or even both, some spotless, some old, some as recent as two weeks ago. They were all there, in the box on the floor beside his bed, unsent and full of memory and sorrow and explanations and little thoughts of her that wandered across his mind like fireflies across an open field. He wrote them periodically, whenever the idea crossed his mind again, and he saved them all, even the ones he wrote when he was drunker than the worst drunk. There were quite a few of those, though they hadn't been as frequent as of late. He exhaled softly, setting the letter back into the box, trailing his fingertips across the surface of a few, willing the memories depart from the pages and fill his mind with her light just once more. He pulled the box closed, taped it shut, addressed it, and drove to the post office.

* * *

It had been two weeks since Italy, one since he sent the letters, and he felt even emptier than before. He was leaving his office early, taking the day off for the first time since he had begun the job; he felt a break was deserved before he lost his mind completely. London smelled of traffic fumes and old perfumes and colognes, a somewhat odd cocktail of scents that forced itself aggressively into his nose. Still, he moved on, hands buried in the pockets of his duster, head staring towards the ground, weaving among the crowd. He heard little fragments of conversation – "No, you can't do that, it's illegal", "Are you bloody insane?", "She'll hardly even know you!"

Little pieces of lives, threaded together in his mind by imagination – lives lived by people who had been born on a certain day and had a favorite color, and maybe liked or hatred chocolate or vanilla or strawberry, and who had loved and lost or perhaps not even loved at all. When you looked at the world – really _looked_ at it, he thought – the sheer magnitude of the number of _people_ was astounding. It wasn't about demographics or population or billions of little numbers, it was about the fact that _every single person_ was born like that, lived a life, spoke a first word, laughed, cried, repressed thoughts and emotions, learned, breathed, and, eventually, died. _Every single person_ had feelings, just as he had, even if they were different; _every single person_ was unique and special and utterly themselves, in their own way. The magnitude of the idea was astonishing. And here he was, a single person in the middle of _billions_, praying to a God he wasn't even sure existed that she would love him again.

_I'm a fool_, he realized. He strode quickly across the street, a quick glance up enough to ensure him of the impending rain.

He was a wet fool by the time he reached his apartment building. He checked in with the doorman and entered the elevator, sliding down to the floor as it began its ascent. He remained that way for a while, curled up with his head between his knees, hands knitted over his wet hair, rising only when the lift stopped. He made his way down the hallway, taking in the still-new, classically cool odor of a newly-refurbished building. The cool air brushed against his wet self and he shivered slightly, fumbling with his keys for a moment before unlocking the door and stepping inside. He turned to lock the door and didn't quite manage to hold down his gasp when slender arms locked around him from behind.

A face was pressed into his shoulder blade, and little fingers were delicately brushing against his chest. "I'm sorry," said the intruder softly, and he undid her arms and turned to face her. Her delicate elfin face was turned down, and he caught her chin with his finger and made her eyes meet his. She let out a little choking laugh, tears blossoming from her eyes. "I got your letter. Letters."

"I'm surprised you didn't burn them like you did the rest of my things," he smiled, brushing a strand of raven silk out of her face. She smiled and turned slightly into the touch, as a moth turned towards a flame.

"Don't believe for a moment I did not consider it, _monsieur_," she promised him, playing with his wet tie. "But against my better judgment, I read them. I read them _all_."

He fought not to wince. "I knew I should've taken a few of those out."

"To which 'few' are you referring, Mr. Castellan?" she asked, a teasing tone singing through her voice, like a lilting birdsong. "The ones that shamelessly begged for my return? The ones that related all of your anger to me?" Her voice dropped, her eyebrow raised, and she stepped a hair closer, fingers tracing a pattern over his chest. "Or was it those ones that you so clearly described the beauty of my bountiful - ?"

"All of them," he cut in, blushing to the tips of his ears. "All of those. They were…drinking letters."

"Yes," she hummed, looking for all the world like a cat who had not only achieved the cream, but had also captured the canary. "I could tell from the multiple cross-outs, misspellings, and the vocalization of things you are _far_ too modest to mention sober, you foolish Englishman."

"My apologies, you lovely Frenchwoman. I find myself possessing a sense of shame, and also a function of the brain called inhibition."

"Pah," she murmured, waving a dismissive hand. "Were they necessary, I'm sure I would know of it." The teasing smile faded then, replaced by a thoughtful expression. She peered up at him, her eyes as illuminated windows of stained glass. A delicate finger came up to trace the line of his mouth, and he fought to keep his tremble in check. "The woman. Truly, she was nothing?"

He snorted softly, little more than a puff of air from his nose. "I'm sorry, I thought you said you'd read all the letters."

She smiled softly, just a slight inclination of one side of her mouth. "Yes. I had to read your first confession several times – well. Not a confession. A profession of innocence, perhaps. I believe you. I was…a fool, Luke."

"We both were," he chuckled. "I still am."

"As am I," she confessed. "Still, how is it that that saying goes? Something about fools in love."

"_A fool in love makes no sense; you are only a fool if you do not love," _he recited automatically.

"Well, I suppose my foolishness is dissipated, then. Or at least forgiven." She looked up at him, eyes tracing his face, and all he could think was how beautiful she looked in his arms. "Are you still a fool now, Luke? With that saying so clear in your mind?"

His breath caught in his throat. _Oh god, no_, he wanted to say. _I'm not a fool, I haven't been a fool since I met you, I've always loved you_. Or perhaps he would say, _I'm only a fool in the sense that I didn't send those letters sooner_, or maybe, simply, _No_. But all of these were beyond him, and all he could do was lean down and capture her mouth with his own. He felt he exuberant push of her lips against his own, her hands in his hair, and he lifted her and spun her, mouths never breaking contact until he set her down again. She laughed, breathlessly, full of adrenaline and love and joy, her back arching into him, a smooth curve so familiar to him that he could have wept. His hands found their place against her waist, and she laughed again and drew his mouth to hers.

They lay sleepily together much later in his bed, watching rainclouds obscure the moon and listening to the raindrops pattering against the windows. He pressed his mouth to her forehead, her neck, her cheek in sweet openmouthed kisses, and she hummed her contentment and twisted her torso to draw him down for another press of lips. He made a noise low in his throat and she smiled. "Insufferable," she told him, twisting her fingers in his hair.

"Sing to me," he replied, and with a little sunlight smile she complied, singing low and sweet as she laid back against him, fingers twining together with his over the messy sheets. Her voice played with music as surely as an instrument, soft and tender for the moment, French and unintelligible even though he spoke the language. Still, the tune was one as familiar to him as her taste and touch and scent, and the words were even more so. Slowly, slowly, as her breathing evened and the singer's voice lulled the singer herself to sleep, he picked up the tune and then the words. He went slowly at first, afraid that his memory would fail him once more, but he realized, with the force of a hurricane, that he has remembered, that no longer are they words forgotten or words half-present, but they are _mots rappelés_, words _remembered._

He pulled his sleeping lover – his sleeping _love_ – close to him, fingers in her little hands, and he sang to her with words that he finally remembered how to sing, and finally, _finally_, the hole inside his heart is filled again. He had awakened from a sleep of what seemed a thousand years, the world the brightest it had been in his life, and so he remained in that moment in time, singing soothing _mots rappelés_ to the only woman he would ever sing them for.

This was his _hymne l'amour_, his anthem of love, remembered and strong.

This was where he belonged.

* * *

A/N

God, just _shoot me_.

I know I suck, seriously. -headdesk-

Lame, cheesy ending. EPILOGUE TOMORROW, AND THEN IS OVER. YES? YES.

Also, my laptop needs to die in a fire. (Not really, darling computer, I love you. ;3;) I had fourteen pages and more on the way for Ada's chapter, and now it is _gone_, like ashes in the wind. So yeah. Delay in updating. -distress-

-Ahem-. So yeah. Um. Cheeeesyyyyy. -drowns-


	4. hymne d'espoir

**Hymne l'amour **

_by: dnrl

* * *

_

epilogue: hymne d'espoir

* * *

The sun was bright and happily shining in his face, but he couldn't find it in himself to do more than scoot back until it _wasn't_, and then he was content. Almost. He threw out his arm to his right, feeling for the touch of warm flesh against his fingers and was disappointed to find nothing but cool sheets brushing against the skin. He sighed and rolled onto his back, turning his head and opening his eyes to look at the empty space on the white sheets were, rightfully, his lover _should_ be. But she _wasn't_. Finally, the outside atmosphere began to penetrate the thick morning fog that roiled around in his head like countryside mists. First came the sounds – soft music filtered through the overhead speakers, something involving acoustic guitar and an Italian woman singing, nothing he really knew, but comforting. Bacon is sizzling in a pan, he could hear it through the slightly open door, and then came the smells – bacon, obviously, followed by the mixed, tumbled scent of his cologne and her perfume mingling on the sheets. Her pillow, slightly indented as it lay next to him, smelled of peaches – her shampoo.

After simply basking in the sensations of the lazy Sunday morning for a few more moments, he came to the realization that he was going to have to get _up_ if he wanted to see her. _Life is so **hard**_, he groused, pushing aside the rumpled sheets and sliding on a pair of pajama pants. Running a hand through his hair, he trotted into the kitchen, stilling his steps as he saw that she was not yet aware he was awake. She was standing at the stove making breakfast, which was utterly fantastic in and of itself, but it was how she _looked_, even from the back, that gave him pause. She was wearing an old t-shirt of his, far too large on her petite frame; it fell to the tops of her knees, ragged and frayed a bit about the sleeves, and he was quite sure he'd never seen anything so beautiful. Her hair was loose and hanging about her shoulders, and as he watched a little hand darted up and pushed a few strands behind her ear. Her skin was glowing in the morning light, and she was humming softly along to the tune of the music falling from the speakers.

He snuck up behind her and wound his arms around her middle, stooping to rest his chin on her shoulder. To her credit, she didn't jump much, and she didn't hit him, and he loved her a little more for that. He loved her a little more for the way she smiled, with the little dimple just around the corner of her mouth, and even more when her eyelashes brushed his cheek when she kissed him _just like that_, a smile pressing into his own. He loved her more when she blinked or breathed or _existed_. He thought, vaguely, that depending on someone this much, adoring them this much, was severely unhealthy. He decided that he didn't care if it killed him, it was marvelous.

"The bacon will burn," she murmured into his neck as he kissed up her jawline.

"Damn," he replied absently. "It'll have charred for a good cause."

She snorted and brushed him off. "Your coffee cup is by the pot," she told him, reaching up into the cabinet for two plates. "Would you press the toaster button, while you're over there?"

He complied, pouring himself a dose of rich coffee and reveling in the smell. He leans back against the counter and watches her work, quick and fluttering like a butterfly or like sunlight on ocean waves, fleeting and bright and like quicksilver. Alive. Here. His. He leaned over and kissed her again, just because he could, just because it felt right. She reached up and tugged on a lock of messy blonde hair, and he let her go back to breakfast. She arched an eyebrow at him with a smirk and positively _sashayed_ away. He gave a long-suffering sigh and took a long sip of his coffee.

He managed to tear himself away from her long enough to fully wake himself up. It was later than he thought – nearly ten o'clock, not that it mattered. Beautiful Paris sunlight – and it _was_ different from London sunlight, it really, _really _was – was beaming down through the windows in their living room, lighting up the couches and armchair and bookshelves. _Their_ living room. It was still enough to set his heart pounding, and he spared a moment to wonder when he had become so…domestic. It didn't really matter how, though, because now he was, and it was marvelous. He had never really had a good home; not a bad one, but not anything spectacular. But this – this smelled like a home, like Thalia-and-Luke, connected and merged and just…one. He saw his desk covered in papers that bore her handwriting, saw her bookshelf filled with his books, two laptops humming away on the coffeetable, and he couldn't actually remember which was his and which was hers, because by now they were sort of interchangeable. He was also fairly sure he had used her toothbrush last night.

He thought these things to himself, smelling French coffee and sweet perfume and even the sunlight, basking in the hum of his lover and the twang of guitar strings, as he leaned against the counter in a tiny cottage on the Seine, filled with joy and contentment, and he'd never been so happy. Still…there was something. Something that needed to be done, needed to be changed, fixed, made better.

He turned back to Thalia as she danced around the kitchen, pulling and pushing and pouring and mixing as she sang. She paused when she felt his gaze, and when she smiled at him, the beginnings of laugh lines sprouting from the corners of her eyes, he suddenly saw her with white hair and age lines and eyes still as bright and happy as the noontime sky, and he knew.

He knew that she was that woman people always spoke of – "the one I'll spend the rest of my life with." Only he meant it, heart and soul, because if he wasn't spending his life with her he wasn't _living_, and it was that, more than anything else, that made his heart pound for a moment.

There was a French phrase trilling around in his head, sweet and loving and somewhat mystifying, and he knew that it was about that feeling that was rising in tempo with his love, with his passion, with his devotion. It rose as a phoenix from ashes, as a song from silence, as a smile from a lover.

_C'est une hymne d'espoir,_ it sang, and it meant –

Well.

Words failed, his English abandoned him, and it was all he could do to cling to the feeling and hold Thalia tight, too overwhelmed to even think of answering her startled questions. When he had some measure of control, some level of composure, it was all he could do to murmur the words against her lips, again and again, until she understood. Laughing, she pressed her fingers against his cheekbones and cupped his face in her hands.

"It is _hope_, Luke," she smiled, all soft words and gentle touches. "Hope."

He let out a laugh that was almost a cry and pressed his lips into her hair again. "Hope," he echoed, and the word was like a teardrop in the ocean, utterly unable to convey the sheer mass of the entirety.

* * *

Their anthems were dual – _hymne l'amour_ all could see, an anthem of love; but there was a hidden beat, a different melody, a second anthem that thrummed throughout melancholy, depression, loneliness, defeat, and rejoining.

Their _hymne d'espoir_, their anthem of hope, burned bright for all to see.

* * *

A/N

-groan- Ohmygooood. Sorry for the late posting, but I'm sick. Urgh. Been sleeping and practically OD'ing on meds all day; stayed awake long enough to answer a couple of messages, then almost passed out again. I hate this, really I do.

Lamer chapter is _lamer_, dammit, and it makes me sad. D:

Also, I know the pressure points on your hands that are good for relieving headaches; anybody else know any of them? (Pain relief points, I mean, I know most of the pain-causing ones.) _Because my head, she hurts. ARGH_.

Ahem.

...-drowns in cheese-

I'm just gonna go die in a corner now. -crawls away-


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